3 Ways To Reduce Risk & Get Control Over New Projects With FreeUp

Are you looking to get started using freelancers to ramp up your projects, but worried about over-committing?

One of the great things about using freelancers in your business is that you can do it at a MUCH lower commitment than a traditional 40-hour employee.

Do any of these sound familiar?

• You don’t have enough hours available for ongoing work
• You want to to “flesh out” a freelancer on a probationary period before committing longer term
• You’re wondering how to work with the same freelancers on an intermittent basis for inconsistent projects

These are 3 common scenarios that we run into all the time, and we have built-in solutions at FreeUp to help out with this:

1) Limit Freelancer Hours

Inside of FreeUp, you have the ability to set a max number of hours for a freelancer. This allows you to easily set budgets and make sure your freelancers don’t go over.

Plus, you can increase this or decrease this weekly to fit your needs!

This works great if you don’t have enough work for a full-time position.

It’s also great if you’re just trying out a freelancer to see if it’s a good fit for the long-term while you ramp up.

2) Pausing Freelancers

Inside of FreeUp, after you “hire” someone onto your team, you can pause them in your account at any time.

Once they are paused they won’t be able to bill any more hours, but you still keep access to them on your account.

This works great if you need someone “on-call” like a web developer, a designer, or even an expert that you ping for help!

3) Use Test Tasks To Vet Freelancers

This isn’t necessarily a feature, but a good practice.

When you hire a freelancer, it’s often a good idea to have them do a “test task” before officially onboarding them.

This allows you to really see what they can do in the real world.

For every freelancer I hire, I always do a test task. The test task is directly related to the work they will be doing and can give you a good idea of what their quality of work is, their communication and attitude.

In general the best practices are:

• Make sure the test task is directly related to the type of work they will be doing
• Set a time limit for the test task
• Set a clear deadline and deliverable
• Pay the freelancer for their time, whether or not they are officially hired

In the FreeUp interface, you will need to “hire” the freelancer before having them perform a test task so they can bill hours, but you can also take advantage of the “limit” feature to make sure they don’t go over!

We wrote a whole post on test tasks here.

Conclusion

By using these features and strategies, you can get more control over your projects!

Are you ready to get started?

Click here to log in and put in a freelancer request today!

Or, you can book a call with us to talk about your situation!